Policy Change
After months of blogging, I have decided to change my policy of referring to the Arabs who claim to be “Palestinians” as “palestinians”.
Where possible, I shall now refer to them as “PLO Arabs.”
I strongly encourage all other right-wing bloggers to follow suit, since even the word “palestinian”, with no capital letter, somehow aknowledges their claim that they were a distinct national group living in what was then known as Palestine. But the more I learn about the history of the time, the more I realize that the only group referred to as “Palestinians” were the Jews living there at the time.
As Alan Dershowitz (by no means politically right-wing) states in his excellent book The Case for Israel:
..the small and decreasing Arab-Muslim population of the area was also a transient and migratory population, as contrasted with the more stable, if smaller, Jewish population. The myth of a stable and settled Palestinian-Arab-Muslim population that had lived in villages and worked the land for centuries, only to be displaced by the Zionist invaders, is simply inconsistent with the recorded demographic data gathered not by the Jews or Zionists but rather by the local authorities themselves.
Filed Under: Blogger Archives
About the Author: An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.
Dennis Miller on Palestine
Dennis Miller on the ongoing “tensions” in the middle east:
For those who don’t know, Dennis Miller is a comedian who has a show
called Dennis Miller Live on HBO. He recently went on a rant about the
situation:
—————-
A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to all Americans who still don’t get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you really need.
Don’t thank me. I’m a giver. Here we go:
The Palestinians want their own country. There’s just one thing about
that: There are no Palestinians. It’s a made-up word.
Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like “Wiccan,”
“Palestinian” sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before
the Israelis took the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt and the West
Bank was owned by Jordan. There were no “Palestinians” then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know?
Say hello to the Palestinians,” weeping for their deep bond with
Their lost “land” and “nation.”
So for the sake of honesty, let’s not use the word “Palestinian” any
more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths (until someone points out they’re being taped.) Instead, let’s call them what they are: “Other Arabs Who Can’t Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death.”
I know that’s a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this,
then: Adjacent Jew-Haters.” Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing. No, they don’t. Not really. They could’ve had their own country any time in the last thirty years,
especially two years ago at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living. That’s no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel.
They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course — that’s where the
real fun is — but mostly they want Israel. Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel – or “The Zionist Entity” as their textbooks call it — for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they’re the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward people on God’s Earth. And if you’ve ever been around God’s Earth, you know that’s really saying something.
It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic
about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mideast. Unless I’m
missing something, the Arabs haven’t given anything to the world since
Algebra, and, by the way, I’m SURE all our children are thankful for that one.
Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five
million Jews.
Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel the
fifty yard line. And now these same folks swear that if Israel gives them half of that fifty yard line, everyone will be pals.
Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars
to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.
My friend Kevin Rooney made a gorgeous point the other day: Just
Reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not. Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children? Disgusting.
No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst
Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.
Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that
with vital operations coming up against Iraq and others, it’s in our
interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can’t be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of supermodels who’ve just had their drugs taken away.
However, in any big-picture strategy, there’s always a danger of
losing moral weight. We’ve already lost some. After September 11 our
president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.
If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we
Would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan. (Hey, wait a minute, that’s actually not such a bad id . . . ooh, that is, what a horrible thought, yeah, horrible.)”
I think you will find this was actor Larry Miller
Anonymous writes: